Veteran Reporter Explains: Bombing in Green Zone Not Just Another Iraq Bombing

April 12, 2007 — -- There is a swimming pool in the Green Zone, and a coffee shop rivaling any Starbucks, along with a café, palm trees … and lots and lots of security.

There is no place I've visited around the globe -- and that list is long -- where security is tighter.

So tight, in fact, that the last time I visited the Green Zone two weeks ago they wouldn't let me in. And I was in a VIP convoy. I was with embassy officials and was in the same car with them, but I did not have an embassy pass. I was forced to jump out of the vehicle, stand around the cement barriers and wait for the convoy to return.

I started visiting the Green Zone long before it became a target. In the fall of 2003, I stood outside the palace, which still had the heads of Saddam Hussein atop it, with Walt Slocombe. Slocombe was head of defense in the Coalition Provisional Authority at the time.

A few months after the picture was taken, rockets hit the Green Zone and Slocombe e-mailed me to ask me to let his wife know he was OK. Unfortunately, the drama of that day soon became fairly routine. But that rocket attack was "indirect" fire -- insurgents who launch rockets or mortars from miles away hoping for a lucky hit. Only a few did damage, but when they do hit around people, the damage is catastrophic. Last month, several Americans inside the Green Zone were killed when a rocket slammed down near where they were working.

Still, getting a bomb inside the Green Zone was long considered difficult if not impossible. In 2004, the impossible became reality, when a suicide bomb exploded at a small Green Zone café. Security officials vowed it would never happen again.

Even after that, and the fatal rocket attacks, walking around the Green Zone felt remarkably safe -- a giant enclave for diplomats and bureaucrats well out of view of the normal chaos that is downtown.

Yes, you can sit in the courtyard and hear gun battles raging outside the gates, or the deep thud of a suicide bomb, but it seems so far away. I don't like going to the Green Zone, because it seems so disconnected from the war. I prefer staying with the military, where the reality of Iraq is stark.

And the convention center? It is a place every journalist has visited often after passing through multiple checkpoints -- whether to interview senior military officials, attend press conferences, or to pick up a press pass. It was considered an oasis. But then today … the impossible again became reality.

The suicide bombing, said military officials, was almost certainly carried out with inside help, and possibly with lots of it. That now makes this oasis just one more part of Iraq's always-changing frontline.